Parser and pretty printer for Rust

language-rust aspires to efficiently and accurately parse and pretty print the Rust language. The underlying AST structures are also intended to be as similar as possible to the libsyntax AST rustc uses itself. When language-rust and rustc have diverging AST, the divergence should be detailed in the documentation.

A typical use looks like:

>>> :set -XTypeApplications +t
>>> import Language.Rust.Syntax

>>> -- Sample use of the parser
>>> import Language.Rust.Parser
>>> let inp = inputStreamFromString "fn main () { println!(\"Hello world!\"); }"
inp :: InputStream
>>> let sourceFile = parse' @(SourceFile Span) inp
sourceFile :: SourceFile Span

>>> -- Sample use of the pretty printer
>>> import Language.Rust.Pretty
>>> pretty' sourceFile
fn main() {
  println!("Hello world!");
}
it :: Doc b

Building

Cabal

With Cabal and GHC, run

cabal install happy --constraint 'happy >= 1.19.8'
cabal install alex
cabal configure
cabal build

Stack

With the Stack tool installed, run

stack init
stack build

The second command is responsible for pulling in all of the dependencies (including executable tools like Alex, Happy, and GHC itself) and then compiling everything. If Stack complains about the version of Happy installed, you can explicitly install a recent one with stack install happy-1.19.8.

Evolution of Rust

As Rust evolves, so will language-rust. We will make a best effort to support unstable features from nightly as they come out, but in general will only target compatibility with stable.

Bugs

Please report any bugs to the github issue tracker.

Parser

Any difference between what is accepted by the rustc parser and the language-rust parser indicates

• a bug in language-rust (this is almost always the case)
• a bug in rustc
• that there is a newer version of rustc which made a breaking change to this syntax

If the AST/parser of rustc changes, the rustc-tests test suite should start failing - it compares the JSON AST debug output of rustc to our parsed AST.

Pretty printer

For the pretty printer, bugs are a bit tougher to list exhaustively. Suggestions for better layout algorithms are most welcome! The fmt-rfcs repo is loosely used as the reference for "correct" pretty printing.